Invoices with a QR payment part

What the QR payment part contains

Since the orange and red payment slips were retired, every Swiss invoice carries a QR payment part. It consists of the receipt on the left and the payment part on the right, with the Swiss QR Code in the middle. Your customer scans the code with their banking app, and everything is filled in.

The code holds what the bank needs to pay:

• Account: an IBAN or a QR-IBAN
• Creditor: your business’s name and address
• Amount and currency, in CHF or EUR
• Debtor: your customer’s name and address
• Reference: a QR reference or none
• Additional information, such as a message

QR-IBAN and QR reference

You can tell a QR-IBAN by its institution ID between 30000 and 31999, in positions five to nine. It is only allowed together with a QR reference. That is a 27-digit number whose last digit is a check digit. It lets you recognise every payment beyond doubt.

With an ordinary IBAN, Bilanzi issues the invoice without a reference. That works just as well, you then match the payment by amount, date and sender. Bilanzi checks these rules on every invoice before it builds the payment part. A faulty payment part would be rejected by your customer’s banking app, and you would only notice when the money does not arrive.

How you create a QR-bill in Bilanzi

You choose the customer, enter the lines with quantity, price and VAT rate, and issue the invoice. Sender and bank account come from your master data. From the moment of issue, the number and the entry are final, and the invoice is an open receivable in the ledger.

Then you generate the PDF with the payment part and send it to your customer. The invoice is in the customer’s language: English, German, French or Italian. Customers in the eurozone get an invoice in EUR. You take the rate from the monthly average published by the tax administration or set it yourself. It is fixed when you issue the invoice, and your books stay in Swiss francs.

When the payment arrives, you import the bank statement. Bilanzi recognises the reference and suggests the matching invoice. You confirm, and the item is paid. If an invoice is no longer right, you issue a credit note instead of changing the invoice.

When the payment does not come

You set the reminder levels yourself: after how many days, with what fee and with what default interest. Bilanzi sets no rate for you, because that is your business’s decision. For every fee and every interest rate you record what it is based on.

A reminder run is a proposal with a cut-off date. You see every overdue invoice with its next level, take out the ones you want to skip, and approve the run. A customer who paid in the meantime gets no reminder. Every reminder carries its own payment part, including for invoices in EUR.

QR-bills you receive

The code helps the other way round too. You take a photo of a supplier’s invoice, and Bilanzi reads the QR code right in your browser. The image is not sent anywhere. The result is a draft with creditor, IBAN, reference and amount. You check every field against the document before you save.

Bilanzi does not read the VAT from the code, because the code only states the gross amount. You enter the VAT rate and the input tax deduction yourself.

What does not work yet

Bilanzi does not use the Creditor Reference, the one starting with RF, on your own invoices. It does read it on invoices you receive.

The QR reader does not read PDFs. Take a photo of the page with the payment part or save it as an image. The payment part follows the Swiss guidelines and every invoice is checked against their rules. No bank has formally approved it, though. So send your first invoice to someone where a follow-up question costs nothing.

Frequently asked questions

Related topics

• Bank reconciliation

  You import the bank statement as a file. Bilanzi suggests a match for every transaction and tells you why. The decision is yours.

• The VAT return

  Bilanzi works out the VAT return from the lines you post anyway. You check it position by position and file it with the ESTV yourself.